Mediameme

Just got back from a great summer road trip with my family. It was quick, memorable and fun. As we drove home, the parallels between planning an outstanding road trip and creating a successful social media program are very striking. Here’s an easy to remember approach:

Where Are We Headed?
Select a place that everyone is excited about and make sure everyone is on board.  If the social media program is designed for inspiring facebook fans of the brand, but it’s not a unanimous decision, keep talking. One dissenter can lead to indifference or worse, impatience, when things go wrong.

Take your Time
In addition to the major destination, plan lots of pit stops leveraging influential long-tail communities to pick up new fans and meet enthusiasts. The pit stops should be based on the insights derived from a listening platform but also peppered with opportunities to connect with brandividuals — brand influencers who are well-connected via social media. It’s also helpful to take bathroom breaks once in awhile and check your online research with people in real life at the rest stop.

Make sure your plan is flexible enough to accommodate new insights without torturing your team or brand fans.  A road trip and social media are both as much about the experience as getting to the destination. If your priority is getting there quickly, be prepared to spend lots of money.

Do Your Homework

Just as  your car needs to be serviced and running well, so does your social media team. If  your plan rests on a popular site, already be woven into their social community so when you reach out to their sales folks, you can focus on your destination instead of spray and pray (spray your messages all over the map and pray it all works).

Be sure to keep all the members of your team — not just those on the same payroll as you — on the same page via collaboration tools. Check in with the team regularly — at least daily.  Just like you would secure your home before the trip, have a scenario planning meeting or two with folks who are responsible for the product or service at the heart of your program. If you’re uncertain about what may happen when the program launches or some of the places you may find your content being posted, familiarize yourself with the horror stories, including how the brand or company recovered.

Pack Smart
Pack with your brain, and your heart. Most brand managers and marketers are tempted to throw everything ‘out there’, but that only creates more noise and confusion. Less is more.  Don’t force your brand fans to sit between a cooler and a tent — let them pack the proverbial car through content they love to create. Remember — you’re the driver and navigator.

Bring Music, Video, Games and More
Don’t forget the entertainment!  Stop ‘selling’ and start entertaining with games, video, and music. Let the community create a ‘road trip’ soundtrack or movie for your brand.

Road trips, like social media programs, are a lot of fun when they’re rockin’, but they are also a lot of detail-oriented, roll-up-your-sleeves, “thinking and doing” kinds of hard work.With big payoffs for people and the companies they work for.  Instead of telling a travel agent (agency) to ‘book the flight and a car’, travelers do the heavy lifting themselves. The road trippers have to participate in social media communities to understand how they work and know what kinds of sites and tools are better for which kinds of tasks. There’s much more upfront planning time and people needed.

The payoff?

1. Social media programs cost a lot less hard cash in total (than paid media programs, for example, when a new product is launched),

2. The company gains access to and education from a variety of people with different skills and life experiences

3. Cross-functional employees get to know each other and customers a lot better.

4. Deeper loyalty from brandvocates

And just like a real road trip: those involved in the social media program share the memories and experience of the adventure together. Forever.

Flickr Credits: chartno3; Usonian; mahalie; Torri 479; eyetwist

Influencers.

Chris Anderson’s Long Tail is a foundational theory for digital marketing. Perhaps you’ve heard the term and vaguely understand what The Long Tail means, but why is it important and how does it change marketing and business?

See where the dinosaur’s head is located?  Those are the generic places online that capture a wide cross-section of audience: Facebook, Google, YouTube, eBay, etc.  The tail refers to the more niche sites, for instance within social networking it may be bookworms who want recommendations by friends or cyberfriends they trust at Goodreads, so if you are in the publishing business, joining the conversation both at the head (e.g. Facebook — create a bookswap group) as well as a niche site like Goodreads means you are working both the folks who might have a more casual interest in your brand as well as the influencers who can catapult masses of people into your brand with a few lines in a post or comment.

Where do you find the long tail communities like Goodread? Mashable posted this great list of 350 social networks by interest, which is a good starting point. From there you may find people who blog on more specialized subjects. You’ll also find links to forums and other information in users’ profiles once you join the networks that are closely aligned to your brand.

Happy Hunting!

<image of the Long Tail for this post comes from Left Click, a NZ-based SEO and usability firm>

Ok, so it’s not enough that you’ve connected with everyone you’ve ever met in your entire life thanks to sites like Facebook or viewed about a thousand how to videos on YouTube so you know the best way to fold a tee-shirt. Now <drum roll> comes Friendfeed.

Friendfeed allows you to aggregate all of your web 2.0 subscriptions in one place: Digg, Flickr, Delicious, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, your own blog feed — there are 28 services currently enrolled. You can see what all your friends are doing…who they are following, what pictures they are sharing, what videos they are viewing and who else in your network they know…it’s simultaneously creepy and voyeuristic. Here’s a high-level tour courtesy of demogirl.